Hating Change

In my last blog post (January 29), I spoke of the impermanence of the solar system and our resistance to such change.  Part of my own concern about global warming has to do with my wanting Earth to remain the same as when I first arrived.  I am distressed about the disappearance of coral reefs and of the other ocean creatures that depend on them, even though I have never snorkeled.  I am dismayed that rising temperature and decreasing pH foster increasing jellyfish populations in formerly cold, fish-supporting, neutral ocean waters I have never visited.  I mourn the demise of polar bears, and I miss the aboriginal rain forest, though I’ve never visited either the Arctic or Brazil.
    I feel much the same about past conditions on Earth that differed from the present.  Two-plus billion years ago, photosynthesis changed Earth’s atmosphere, adding oxygen gas that poisoned a vast number of organisms, while leading to the fitness of vast numbers of new ones.  A few million years later, the entire earth froze, causing a huge extinction.  Another freeze a billion and a half years later had a similar effect.  And for various other reasons, Earth has experienced repeated mass extinctions.  All this happened before Homo sapiens was even a gleam in evolution’s eye.  Yet I take it personally.
    What are we to make of all this brutal change our planet has undergone?  What are we to make of the major earthly climate change we seem to be causing?  Many of our fellow creatures may not survive.  
    Yet Earth will survive, probably with a very different set of species.  And down the road several billion years, as I mentioned in my January 29 post about my disaffected student, the Sun will certainly burn out.  So vast a loss is too much to comprehend.  It turns me toward God for spiritual rescue.